Living Creatively in Challenging Times

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It’s that time of year again, but before moving on to New Year’s Resolutions, be sure to give yourself credit for 2011.

Now, this may (at first glance) seem like a pointless exercise. Thinking back on the past year, it can be easy to focus on all that you hoped to do that’s still undone: The jobs you applied for and failed to get, the book you didn’t write, the exercise program that you planned to make a regular part of your life. (If you’re anything like me, you didn’t.)

That was certainly the direction my mind went when I first contemplated this task—which was why I was so happily surprised to see it was misleading me. (This was hardly the first time: I’ve long recognized that just because I think something doesn’t mean it’s true.) Here’s a sampling of what I accomplished over the past year:

Cleared out the packed storage unit that I’d been meaning to get rid of for a decade (and wrote an essay about it)

Completed a graduate class in a social work (and no, I doubt that I’ll continue with the program, but I’d been thinking about it for a long time and am glad I tried it out.)

Fulfilled a longstanding dream of working with foster kids, including planning a writing workshop to be sponsored by Friends of Children this spring

Got some really interesting freelance writing gigs that are likely to lead to more

Made lots of great friends in my great new community of Northampton Massachusetts, the first place I’ve lived in a long time that really feels like home.

There’s lots more, but you get the idea.

This was an especially interesting exercise for me given my initial assessment that this had been a long hard year primarily defined by failure. I felt like I’d spent most of the year trying, failing, getting up, then trying again. Along with the successes listed above, I’d applied for (and been rejected for) a whole bunch of different jobs. I wrote and circulated a book proposal that failed to elicit any interest from the agents who perused it. The list goes on.

Happily, I had this year’s daily log to contradict these thoughts. As I recently wrote in Huffington Post, I started keeping daily logs more than a decade ago after trading my structured life as a law firm associate for the free-form existence of an aspiring novelist. At the time, I was reaching the end of the week in a mild state of panic, thinking “I’m not getting anything done! What is wrong with me?”

In an effort to take charge of my schedule, I started using a blank bound book — a so-called lawyer’s diary for which I had no further use — to track my activities day by day. And lo and behold, I wasn’t such a slacker after all! It just felt that way. (Lest there be any doubt, I did indeed write and ultimately publish two novels.)

Tracking accomplishments can be especially important in Plan B Nation, where many of us are dealing with more failures than we have in the past. (That’s certainly the case for me.) The fact is, these are challenging times, and it’s not our fault. Making a concerted effort to recognize our successes can help us to remember that we do indeed have significant strengths.

So go ahead and make those New Year’s Resolutions—and do your best to stick to them. But before cracking the whip for 2012, celebrate 2011.

A year ago today, I was packing up my Cambridge apartment a stone’s throw from Harvard Square and preparing to return to Northampton, the bucolic western Massachusetts college town where I’d previously lived for two years in the early aughts.

I’d been in Cambridge for six years, and a hard six years it was. I’m still not quite sure why. It was the third time I’d lived in the storied educational mecca, home to Harvard, MIT, and countless brilliant minds. I’d been there twice as a student. This time I was back for a job at Harvard Law School, where I ultimately wound up writing speeches for then-Dean (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan.

It was a pretty great job in a pretty great city, but for some reason my life never really came together there. Most difficult—and puzzling—of all was the fact that I couldn’t seem to make friends. Being single, my friends have always been especially important to me, and not having any good friends close at hand—well, it was quite a challenge.

In fairness, by the time I moved, I’d manage to collect a handful of intimates, but given the time and effort I put in, the results were pretty paltry. Was it me? I wondered. It had to be me. After all, who wouldn’t like Cambridge?

This was pretty much the way my thoughts were going when my boss decamped for Washington, D.C., and my Harvard job abruptly ended in the spring of 2009. At the time, it seemed to make sense to just stay put. I had a strong professional network in the Boston area, and even with the Great Recession upon us, the region’s job market was still relatively robust (at least compared to other places).

Over the next year-plus, I picked up freelance projects and other short-term work, but more and more, I found myself pining to return to western Mass. While I’d last lived in Northampton a decade before, I’d made frequent trips back to see friends, and I loved my weekend visits. Still, I sternly reminded myself, mini-vacations are not real life. Making a move wouldn’t change any of the very real difficulties facing me. I’d still be jobless, looking for work, still financially strained. I’d still be single (which is great if you choose it, but the fact is, I had not).

Also: I already knew from experience that just because I thought a change would make my life better didn’t mean that it would. Psychologists have a fancy name for this—affective forecasting error—the idea being that we humans are notoriously poor predictors of what will make us happy.

Wherever you go there you are. The saying stuck in my mind. Everyone knows that you can’t change your life by simply changing your surroundings–and lest you have any lingering doubt, research bears this out. In one often-cited study, researchers found that people who believed they would be happier living in California actually would not be. I couldn’t help but suspect that Northampton might be my personal California (albeit a far chillier and less sunny one).

And so it went until my unhappiness reached the point that even an unlikely option seemed worth the risk. I didn’t know what else to do. Plus, I couldn’t help thinking—or at least hoping—that a move might serve as a jump start.

I was encouraged to find some support for this notion in journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. There, Gladwell recounts the story of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a bustling self-sufficient town established in the nineteenth century by immigrants from a single Italian village. In the 1950s, a physician discovered that the town’s residents enjoyed astonishingly good health, with men over 65 dying from heart disease at half the rate of the United States as a whole, and with death rates from all causes 30% to 35% lower than expected. After significant research aimed at controlling for variables–diet, genetics, exercise–researchers concluded that, remarkably enough, residents’ health could be traced to nothing more than the fabric of town life, with its rich social bonds and traditions.

Maybe I was grasping at straws, but this seemed promising. It seemed to suggest that while “moving to California” might not in itself boost happiness, the sense of belonging to a vibrant community could have a profound impact. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that this made total sense. After all, wasn’t it likely that I’d be happier in a place that I knew and loved, surrounded by people I cared about and who cared about me?

Moreover, I was able to garner research to back me up. Again and again, close relationships with family and friends have been shown to be one of the strongest proven predictors of happiness.

Reader, I moved.

And as I approach my one-year anniversary in Northampton, I’m delighted to tell you that I am indeed far, far happier than I was before. While the move certainly hasn’t fixed everything—I’m still looking for work, still looking for love—I’m deeply grateful for my life here. Along with the welcome infusion of human warmth and connection, I cherish the texture of daily life: stopping by the farm down the street to pick up eggs, playing board games with my friends’ kids, working with Friends of Children and Treehouse, local organizations doing cutting-edge work aimed at transforming the nation’s foster care system. The list goes on.

The moral of the story? Changing your surroundings won’t necessarily change your life. But then again: It might.

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About Me

Amy Gutman is a writer and lawyer with eclectic interests and a resume to match. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, and Psychology Today, among other venues, and she is the author of two suspense novels, both published by Little, Brown.She lives and works in Boston, in the heart of Plan B Nation.